Tapping the Dream Tree (14 page)

“What... ?” I began.

“Here she comes,” Meran said. She squeezed my elbow before she stepped away. “Now you have to do your part. Earn your second chance.”

I turned to see Annie coming toward me and didn't worry about the explanation I'd thought I needed so desperately a moment ago. Everything seemed out of focus right then, except for her. I didn't know where I was going to begin. But I knew I had to try.

“What was Meran talking to you about?” she asked as she sat back down on her stool. “The pair of you looked positively conspiratorial.”

“Second chances,” I said.

Annie's eyes went bright behind her glasses again.

“I've got a lot to tell you,” I said.

She studied me for a long moment, swallowed a couple of times. I knew what she was thinking. Once burned, twice shy. Who could blame her? I just prayed the magic words would do their stuff.

“I'm listening,” she said.

It's funny the difference a month can make.

I managed to get a job at a garage a couple of days after that night. I've always been good with cars and my boss is helping me work out a schedule so that I can take the courses I need to get my mechanic's license.

Annie and I are taking it slow. We go on dates, we talk incessantly—on the phone if we're not together. We don't make promises, but we keep them all the same.

I didn't see Meran again until I went to a gallery opening with Annie at the end of January. It was a group show by some friends of hers. The Kelledys were there. Cerin was playing his harp in a corner of the gallery while Meran mingled with the other guests. I waited until I had the chance to talk to her on her own. She was studying a canvas that depicted a flood of wildflowers growing in a junkyard. It was only when you looked close that you saw these little people peeking out at you from among the flowers. They looked like they were made of nuts and twigs, held together with vines, but you could tell they were alive.

“Lovely, isn't?” Meran said.

I nodded. I liked the way it looked both realistic and like a painting, if you know what I mean. All the information was there, but you could still see the brush strokes. Art like this tells a real story; you just have to work out the details on your own.

“I want to thank you for helping me,” I told her.

Meran turned to look at me and smiled.

“I didn't do anything you couldn't have done for yourself,” she said. “Except maybe give you the courage to try. Everything else was already inside you, just waiting for the chance to come out.” She waited a beat, then added, “But you're most welcome all the same.”

I felt so disappointed, the way you do when you finally figure out there isn't a Santa Claus, an Easter Bunny, a Tooth Fairy.

“So … the words ...” I said. “There was no magic in them?”

Of course there wasn't. How could there have been?

Meran kept smiling, but now there was an enigmatic look in her eyes.

“Oh, there's always magic,” she said.

“I lived in a tree,” he
said. “Not in some little house, nestled up in its branches, but deep inside the trunk itself where the sap flows and old secrets cluster. It was a time, let me tell you, but long gone now. Then I was a king in a forest of green; now I live like a beggar in a forest of stone.”

I let him talk. He always had some story or other to tell, and if he invariably came back to this one, I didn't mind. There was something in the telling of this particular story that woke a pleasant buzz in the back of my head, a sweet humming sound like a field full of insects on a summer's day. His quiet voice created a resonance that made me more aware of my own heartbeat and how it resounded against the drum of the world below my feet.

There was a melody playing against that rhythm, but I could never quite grasp it fully. Maybe we never do and that's why there's always a Mystery underlying the world.

“How long did you live there?” I asked when he fell silent, rheumy eyes gazing off into distant memories.

I tried to imagine him as he'd describe himself in the story: strong and tall, dressed all in green, chestnut hair flowing down his back, a great beard half hiding his face. Advisor to kings, a wizard in a tree. But all I could see in my mind's eye was the person who sat here with me on the steps of St. Paul's, an old broken man plagued with a continual cold, hawk's nose dripping, a cough wracking his chest. The only green was an echo of the forest, hidden in those watering eyes.

“How long?” he said. “Forever and a day. Until I befriended a little girl in need of a friend and she pulled me out of my tree with her love. I was free to go then, across the water to the Region of Summer Stars, and so I did. But it wasn't what I thought it would be. I found no peace there, no rest for my old soul.” He coughed, gaze turning from the traffic passing on the street in front of us to meet my own. “Perhaps it was because I didn't die. Because I crossed over, upright and on my own two feet, taking my blood and bones with me.”

Like the forest with its prison tree, this place of summer stars was always vague to me. He gave no details that I could hold on to. From his description, or rather lack of the same, it could be any place or every place.

I took it to mean a pagan heaven, like Tir na nOg, some after-world of the Gael, but that didn't tally except as metaphor. People, even a homeless man such as this with a mystic bent, didn't return from the dead. That was the providence of avatars and saviors and I greatly doubted he was either. But what he was, or once had been, I was unable to say.

“You should leave your bones behind when you go,” he told me. “I learned that quickly enough. Safely buried, or better still, leave them as ashes, burned in a bone-fire. Otherwise this world calls to them and you can never be content. Your blood moves to the tides you left behind and there is ever a yearning for something other than twilight. You long for the sun, and the dark of a moonless night. You long for life.”

“Why is it always twilight there?”

He shrugged. “Maybe it isn't. Maybe it was only twilight for me because the ribbons of my life there were still entwined with this world, this life.”

“Do you still want to go back there?” I asked. “To return?”

“I don't know what I want or don't want. I only know I've been too long in this world, if only viewing it through the bark of a tree for most of my years. I miss something, but I don't know what. Perhaps my old life, before I let curiosity snare me with its woody embrace.”

“What were you in your old life?”

He took so long to answer that I thought he hadn't heard me.

“Let me tell you a story of a king and his advisor,” he said finally. He smiled, eyes clear for a moment. “It explains nothing, but it will pass the time.”

“What if pigeons were really angels?” Jilly said.

Geordie looked down the wide sweep of steps that fronted St. Paul's Cathedral. The usual, unruly flock of pigeons were mooching for handouts from the tourists and passersby up and down their length. In the midst of the birds he could see the old homeless man that everybody called Woody, ragged coat sleeves flapping as he tossed handfuls of sunflower seeds he couldn't really afford to buy. For some reason the sight of the old man made Geordie think of Tanya. Maybe it was because of the stories Woody told, rambling accounts that mixed up well-known fables and fairy tales with pure make-believe. That was the world Tanya lived in, more months out of the year than Geordie cared to dwell on. Hollywood. A more contemporary Land of Make-Believe.

“Sometimes,” Jilly went on, “when I hear the flutter of their feathers in the air, I forget that we don't have wings, too, and I just want to fly.”

“I'm tired of long-distance romances,” Geordie said.

Jilly sighed. “I know you are, Geordie, me lad. That's why I'm trying to cheer you up with pigeon angels.” She waited a beat, then added, “You could always move to L.A. to be with her.”

“And be what?”

“Yourself.”

“And you could always get a job doing storyboards for an ad agency.”

“It's an honorable position.”

Geordie smiled. “Maybe. But it's not you.”

“This is true.”

“That's how it'd be for me out there. I'm all scruff and too poor to be considered eccentric. Could you imagine me going to a premiere or some awards show?”

“You clean up well,” Jilly assured him.

He shook his head. “I'd only embarrass her. She wouldn't say anything, she might not even think it, but come on. Beauty and the beast is an old story. It doesn't play anymore.”

Jilly put an arm around his shoulders and gave him a hug. “You're very broody today and it doesn't suit you at all. Leave the brooding to your brother. Writers are supposed to brood about things. Fiddlers don't. Remember jigs and reels? Happy things?”

Geordie sighed. “I know. I hate mopey people, and here I am, doing it all the same.”

They sat quietly for a moment. Below them the pigeons kept rising in nervous clouds as some imagined danger startled them—a tourist coming too close, the sudden whoosh of a bus—before the flock settled once more.

Without looking at her, Geordie said, “Do you ever get the feeling that although you've never seen a thing, you still know it?”

“Like what?”

“You know, when someone's describing a place you've never been, and it's all familiar, not because you've ever been there, but because you know that one day you'll go there?”

Jilly gave him an odd look. “I suppose ...”

“That's how I feel with Tanya sometimes—like I can already see the time when we won't be together anymore.”

“That kind of thinking makes things happen,” Jilly told him.

“Whatever you think makes something happen.”

“I suppose. So wouldn't it behoove us to think positively?”

Geordie had to smile. “Behoove?”

“It's a word.”

“I know it is. I've just never heard it used in ordinary conversation before. Wait,” he added, forestalling her next comment. “I know. Conversations should never be ordinary.”

“That's not true. I like ordinary conversations. But I also like twisting, windy ones where we work out all the great mysteries of the world in whatever time we have and then sit back and have another cup of tea, knowing it's a job well done.”

“I'd miss you if I moved to L.A.”

Jilly nodded. “I'd miss you, too.” She hesitated, before adding, “But maybe it's something you have to do.”

“Perhaps it was only that you left something undone,” I said the next time the old man and I talked. “That's why you came back.”

“I'm not a ghost.”

“Well, no. Of course not.”

“And we all—the living and the dead—leave things undone. It seems to be part and parcel of human nature to put off today what we hope to do tomorrow.”

“Well, then maybe you simply missed someone.”

He considered that. “No. I don't think that. My lover betrayed me, my king had a sword sheathed in his chest, my father abandoned me to the forest. There was no one else.”

“You sound bitter.”

And had every right to, I suppose, if anything he was saying was true. Even if it was only true in a metaphorical sense.

“Do I?” he said, genuinely surprised. “I suppose I do. But I don't have reason to. Once you have lived as part of a forest you learn to forgo such things.”

“What about the little girl? The one you befriended?”

“The girl?” He shook his head. “She is gone now as well. I think it was a long time ago that we were friends.”

“People don't just stop being friends.”

“Of course. I only meant I hadn't seen her for many years.”

He was quiet for a moment, wiped his runny nose on a raggedy sleeve.

“But perhaps you're right,” he finally said. “I remember telling a reluctant knight once that if certain things don't happen, the spirit never rests. Perhaps some piece of unfinished business waits for me here.”

I waited to see if he had anything more to say, another story to tell, but he looked down at the pavement, silent.

“Do you want a pretzel?” I asked him. “I'm getting one.”

He patted his pockets. “Yes, that would be nice, but I seem to be a little short of the required currency ...”

“I can cover it.”

He smiled, still not entirely back with me yet. “And perhaps something for our feathered friends ...”

I went to get us coffee and pretzels from one of the food carts out by the curb. The vendor gave me a plastic bag with some stale hot dog buns in it when I asked if he had any day-old bread. I took it back with me.

“I think you should do the honors,” he said when I started to hand him the bag.

I took a sip of my coffee, then set it aside and began to break up the buns, tossing the pieces to the pigeons.

“I think I'm supposed to die,” he said as he watched the birds eat. “That's the business I've left unfinished.”

I shot him a worried look.

“Oh, don't worry. I'm not feeling suicidal or anything.”

“Well, that's a relief.”

“But when I do die, would you make a fire of my bones, burn them down to ash and scatter them from here to there, dust to dust and all that?”

“You're saying you want to be cremated.” I made a statement of it, tossed some more bits of bread to the pigeons. “I guess I could do that...” Though where I'd get the money to be able to afford a cremation for him was a whole other kind of mystery, secular, but no less puzzling.

He shook his head. “Not in some … factory. No, in an honest fire, wood and bones. With a friend like you to watch over the flames.”

“They've got laws against the illegal disposing of bodies,” I told him, smiling, making a joke of it.

“There won't be a body,” he assured me. “Only bones.”

“This isn't like one of your stories ...”

“No, of course not.” He put a hand on my arm. “You're throwing too hard. Do it like this.”

He took a handful from me and tossed it with an oddly graceful motion, like it was a dance, but only his arm was moving. I watched the way the little pieces of bread seemed to sail out and among the birds in slow motion.

“Now you try it.”

I did, but I couldn't capture his grace.

“That's better,” he said.

I gave him a surprised look.

“It's because now you're paying attention,” he said. “Doing it like you mean it. You'd be surprised how much satisfaction you can get from the simplest task if you impart it with meaning.”

“She's lined up some work for me,” Geordie said. “A recording gig for this guy who's making a film. Tanya played him a tape of some of my music and apparently it's just what he wants for a couple of scenes.”

Jilly beamed proudly. “That's great.”

“I guess.”

“Can you bring your enthusiasm down a notch or two—you're blinding me with the glare of your happiness.”

Geordie gave her a rueful smile. “I know. I should be happy.”

“So what's the problem? That you didn't get the gig on your own?”

“Well, yes. I mean, no. It's just...”

“It was your music on the tape, right?”

“Sure.”

“So … what?”

Geordie sighed. “I don't know. It's like everything's slipping out of control.”

“You're in a relationship,” Jilly told him. “That means there's give and take. Compromise. She can't make a living here, but maybe you can make one out there. It's not like you're being asked to be someone you're not. And since when did you start worrying about control?”

“I don't mean that I want to be in charge of everything. It's just … I'll be leaving everything and everyone behind.”